The terror group has had great success controlling the West’s narratives about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, despite most of it being outright lies. It is worth analyzing how they achieved this.
By Nachum Kaplan, FUTURE OF JEWISH 26 March 2024
This is a guest essay written by Nachum Kaplan of Moral Clarity.
As someone who has held senior leadership positions in some of the world’s most prestigious newsrooms, and who works as a media strategist for global Fortune 500 companies, I am in awe of how successful the Hamas PR campaign has been.
Hamas’ PR strategy has been highly effective because it has turned mainstream media, policymakers, and corrupt United Nations officials into spokespeople and campaigners for an Islamist terror agenda.
Here is how they have achieved it.
They built on 1,500 years of antisemitism.
Hamas correctly identified that antisemitism was only dormant in the West, and that they just needed to wake the sleeping monster. They knew this because there were clear tells, such as the international media’s fixation on Israel, the over-reporting of the country, and that the Pavlovian way the conflict becomes newsworthy only when Israel responds to an attack.
Hamas stuck to what has worked throughout history. The blood libel trope was modernized into accusations of genocide and deliberate starvation, while the trope of Jews being responsible for their persecution was updated with the notion that Israel had turned Gaza into an open-air prison.
“§they-leveraged-their-numerical-advantage” class=”header-anchor-widget offset-top”>
With more than a billion Muslims globally, Hamas knew it had a huge virtual army it could activate on social media to reach a global audience.
Hamas flooded social media with lies to exploit the Repetition Bias, a heuristic (mental shortcut) in which repeated information feels more true than new or unrepeated information. Social media repeated these lies exponentially, aided by extensive use of AI-generated “photographs.”
The Palestinians also exploited another numerical advantage, the number of Muslim states, which is 48. This has given them weight in forums such as the United Nations and its various committees and bodies, creating a suited army of bureaucrats with credible titles to tell lies to the international press.
Almost comically, Iran has just assumed the presidency of the UN Conference on Disarmament. That is the same Islamic Republic that funds, arms, and trains Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen — and ships arms to Russia to use in its invasion of Ukraine.
“§they-controlled-the-information-flow” class=”header-anchor-widget offset-top”>
Hamas and the Palestinian Authority have used traditional authoritarian tactics to control the information flow from areas they govern. Reporters cannot report freely or unfavorably from Palestinian-controlled territories if they want to retain access. Threats of violence keep the few unsympathetic local reporters in check.
Exploiting the inability of most media to report from Gaza directly, Hamas has used local Gazan “journalists” to feed lies, distorting images, and fabricated data to the credulous international media. Time and again, the foreign press has swallowed them, including claimed civilian death toll numbers that are demonstrably untrue (and presume every person killed was a civilian).
Hamas has only needed the media to report its numbers, knowing that if repeated enough, they be treated as true and that no one will pay attention to the fine print stating they are unverified. Hamas at one point even had the media complaining that Israel was simultaneously not allowing reporters access to Gaza and targeting journalists there.
“§they-mastered-the-hour-news-cycle” class=”header-anchor-widget offset-top”>
The internet has blurred the traditional lines between print and television news, turning all news media into digital services beholden to the 24-hour news cycle.
Hamas has understood that as long as it keeps manufacturing outrages, the news cycle will move on quickly, and they will never be held to account. The Qatar-funded Al Jazeera, which has the veneer of a real news organization, has played a key role in this.
“§they-have-exploited-a-post-truth-world” class=”header-anchor-widget offset-top”>
Hamas recognized that the post-Modernist rot has resonated in much of the West, including across its media and universities. The belief that people cannot only have their own opinions, but their own facts, sounds laughable, but it has become worryingly normal.
Political tribes express opinions mainly as identity signals, and tribal loyalty is more important to these people than truth, or even reality. Hamas has understood that this liberates it from any need to have a fact-based narrative.
“§they-use-simple-slogans” class=”header-anchor-widget offset-top”>
“From the river to the sea,” “by any means necessary” and “no peace on stolen land” are controversial (they call for and justify genocide), grab headlines, make for good visuals, and have strong memetic qualities.
photo: Shai Davidai/X
They poisoned the West’s intellectual well.
Western universities are not antisemitic and anti-Israel by chance. This has been part of a long, concerted, and well-funded campaign. Qatar, which helps fund Hamas and allows its leaders to enjoy luxurious lifestyles in its capital, Doha, has invested billions of dollars in U.S. universities going back to 2001
Qatar is now getting a return on its investment.
Say what you like about Islamists, but they do not suffer the from the short-term thinking that plagues the modern West. They have a multi-generational plan to bring down the West, and they have systematically mal-educated a generation of intellectuals, journalists, and policymakers.
Aggressive mob behavior at rallies globally has ensured domination of the news cycle, whereas peaceful Jewish rallies do not stand a chance in the digital age, in which footage of angry, threatening, and violent mobs are irresistible.
From lighting flares and attacking Jews to defacing statues and picketing Holocaust museums, the campaign to grab the headlines has been relentless and effective.
The days of journalists reporting nothing but the facts are long gone, as the number of journalists who have signed pro-Palestinian petitions in newsrooms around the world shows.
It is odd that journalists should want to advertise their partiality, but the social status gained from such performative grandstanding has proved too alluring.
These petitions provide information that helps Hamas’ propaganda arms know who to target, and where they will get sympathetic coverage.
This involves telling lies that are the precise opposite of what is true, allowing Hamas to claim that Israel and (those shifty) Jews are lying about everything. Consider these examples:
The reality: The Jews are the indigenous people of Israel. It was Jewish insurgents who drove the British out of Palestine. The British were the last in a long line of colonizers that includes the Arabs.
Hamas Lie: Israel is imperialist.
The reality: Israel is small. It is only 470 kilometers (290 miles) north to south, and 135 kilometers (85 miles) east to west. It is surrounded in all directions by large Arab and non-Arab Muslim states. The tiny spec on the map is not an empire. That is absurd.
Percentage of Muslims in the Middle East (credit: Maps on the Web)
The reality: The Jews are the victims of ethnic cleansing, from Europe and the Arab world. About 21 percent of Israelis are Arabs, and another five million Palestinians live in what was British Mandatory Palestine. By contrast, there are no Jews in Palestinian territories because they were ethically cleansed.
The reality: The Jews were the victims of the worst genocide in history in the Holocaust, and on October 7th were the victim of a genocidal attack from Hamas.
Furthermore, the U.S. Census Bureau International Database shows that the Palestinian population of Gaza was 265,800 in 1960; 342,700 in 1970; 431,600 in 1980; 645,100 in 1990; 1.1 million in 2000; 1.5 million in 2010; and 2.1 million in 2023.
This is the opposite of what would happen if there was genocide.
Ka[lam should point out that the observation that if a lie is repeated often enough people sccept it as the truth comes straight from Hitler’s Mein Kampf. While this “Big Lie” technique has probably always been used by demagogoues, iy was Hitler who first “diagnosed” and described it Hitler also built on a 1,500 year tradition of antisemitism just as the “Palestinians,” the League of Arab States, the Organization of the Islamic Conference, and the UN agencies heavily influenced by them do today. The antisemitic “tropes” that recycle the blood libel into its modern euivalents, such as the “genocide” thing , which was specifically invoked by Hitler, not only in Mein Kamph but in thousands of speeches, is also directly inspired by Hitler. Mein Kamph was translated into Arabic many years ago, and has long served as a sort of guidebook or primer for Arab and Islamic nationalists.